Frank Dunn: From ‘Shantytown’ to shaking hands with the next president

Saturday

Apr 19, 2014 at 7:00 AM

Dave Clarke

I was once scared to death of Frank Dunn.For those who know “Top” Dunn, let me quickly point out we were in grade school at the time and later became longtime friends.Frank died March 28 at his home at age 67 after several years of dealing with health issues. It was far too soon for someone so full of life.He worked more than 40 years as a gas regulator technician for Illinois Power, later Ameren Illinois. You’d have a hard time finding anyone who would say a bad thing about him. He was always having a good time and I enjoyed chatting with him at Beck’s or some other place whenever our paths would cross.So, what was I scared of in second grade?First, a little more about Frank. When he graduated from Wethersfield High School in 1966, he went to a college in South Carolina on a track scholarship. His education was cut short when his father died and he returned to Kewanee to take care of his mother. He got married, had kids and was the first African-American ever hired in Illinois Power’s Kewanee District. According to his obituary, he enjoyed golf, fishing, hunting, traveling and discussing politics, something that would lead him to meet the future leader of the free world right here in Kewanee.A few years ago he and Ray Cruse and a few WHS classmates decided to track down their old basketball coach, Jim Sutch, and others they went to school with in a “Where are they today” cross-country search. Frank really enjoyed reliving his high school days. Maybe not so much his days in grade school.When I was in first and second grades, Frank, along with a few other “older” black students, were a grade ahead of me. They weren’t physically mean to us younger kids, but harassed us every chance they got. Living on a farm, I had very little exposure to other kids and the whole school experience frightened me to begin with. Bigger kids with black skin taunting me were some of the scariest times of those years.As the school years progressed, we all learned to get along, and even became friends, as most kids do. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I learned about the world Frank and the others had come from when they wound up in the lower grades in the Blish building with a bunch of white kids. It was an entirely new experience in their young lives and a part of Kewanee’s unrecorded history we’ve never heard much about.It was the mid-1950s and even though this was the integrated North, there was still what I would call subtle, even unintended segregation and Kewanee was no different. I have been told that when it opened in 1940, Evergreen Memorial Gardens, south of town, had a “whites only” stipulation in the contract. When the Housing Authority of Henry County built Knox Homes, now Project NOW’s Knox Apartments, in 1952, it was intended for “blacks only” who lived in that part of town. Fairview Apartments, the federal housing project on East Third Street, was primarily for whites.It sounds abhorrent in 2014, but back then it was just the way life was and people, both black and white, usually adjusted to it.The only time I recall Frank and I having a serious conversation about race was in January of 2009. I had forgotten about it until I came across the column while gathering material for this one. Barack Obama had just been sworn in after being elected the first African-American president of the United States. Frank was a huge admirer of Obama’s going back to when he first ran for the Senate.That day in 2009 he brought in a photo of himself and Obama standing side-by-side taken at the then-senatorial candidate’s stop at Windmont Park in 2004. We talked about those early childhood days when he was the “big third grader” and I was the “little second grader” at Wethersfield.He said his parents, John and Flora, moved from Kentucky in 1948, so their baby son would have a better life away from the segregated South. They came to Kewanee because an uncle had a job at Walworth.His siblings, John “Tootsie,” who was in my class, and Lulu were born here. They lived in an area east of the railroad tracks and south of Chautauqua Park where many black families had located since the 1920s. The factories on Burlington Avenue had not yet been built and city utilities did not yet extend to the area.In those days, the area was out in the country.Residential Wethersfield ended at Acorn Street and children in kindergarten through eighth grade who lived west of there went to the one-room Good School, a short ways west of the railroad crossing on the Page Street Extension on land donated by a farmer named Good. High school students went to the “town school” in Wethersfield. The story is told in a book published in 1996 by retired teacher Kathryn Mursener, “History of Wethersfield Schools.”In 1949, the state began closing country schools and sending all children to town schools. This caused a space problem at Wethersfield, which then included only the Blish building and a high school on the north side of McClure Street. There were more than 170 students in “rural” schools, including 60 at the Good School, which had to be added to the student population at Wethersfield.Since the Good School had the largest number of students of any of the country schools, it was decided in June of 1950 to “bring the school to the students” and a vacant lot at the corner of Knox and Miner streets was purchased by the newly formed Wethersfield CUSD 230 and the Good School building was moved to the site.According to Mursener, a one-room schoolhouse was also moved from Neponset and set to the south. The buildings were connected in the middle, making a three-room school built over a full concrete-block basement. It was called the Knox Street School. “It stood as something special to the patrons,” Mursener wrote. “In September of 1950 a happy group of youngsters of all eight grades gathered in the new building for the adventure of their young lives. There were three devoted teachers — Vivian Meyer, Esther Warner and principal/teacher Fred Mursener (her husband). The children were of many nationalities but had learned to co-exist and it was a joy to teach them.”Mrs. Mursener said they did encounter “prejudices from the outside,” but found help from churches, doctors, businessmen and others when a need arose. In addition to the school, Roper’s store was a neighborhood anchor for many years.“At times some of the people who lived in the area were a bit unkind to ‘outsiders,’ Mursener said. “They thought they came out of curiosity. As teachers, we felt free to be there and felt a comradeship with them. We planned social activities at the school and in our home in order to provide a better understanding to help them fit into the ‘real world.’ These were challenging years and we have now seen the ‘fruits of our labors’ in the fine young people they became.”By 1954, when Frank would probably have been in first grade, Wethersfield had built a new high school in 1952 and shifted fourth through sixth grades into the previous building across McClure. Called the Craig School, it was destroyed by fire in 1965.There was some apprehension on both sides about the merger, according to Mursener. “The town folks weren’t sure they wanted ‘those people’ in school ‘with their kids,’ and the Knox Street parents weren’t sure they wanted to come, even though their high school age children were already there.”The teachers worked all summer to convince pupils and parents it would be OK and in September of 1954, what would come to be dubbed “the Shantytown bus” began daily runs bringing the west-end students to their new school and for many, a new world.Mursener alludes to poverty and poor living conditions in “Shantytown,” and there were many homes with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. But while it was also by no means South Chestnut Street, there were many good houses and good families on Dewey, Dodge, Church, Division and other streets in that part of town.In addition to the Dunns, there were the Evans, Blanks, Scott, Stevenson, Guthrie, Roulds, Brinker, Stalllworth, Dixon and other black families at Wethersfield. Some may remember it differently, but other than the usual angst and drama of school life, we all basically got along. It was where I learned to judge people by their actions, not by the color of their skin. The “shanties” of “Shantytown” have been replaced in recent years by modern, upscale homes, giving the area a new, suburban look. Frank recalled in our 2009 conversation/interview that they felt like they had to be tougher and faster and always knew, no matter how they were treated, they were always different.An awakening moment in my awareness of race came when I was a student at Western Illinois University. I attended a speech by James Farmer, co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization that sought to bring an end to racial segregation in the United States through nonviolence.The civil rights leader said something that has always stayed with me: There comes a time early in the life of every black child when they learn they don’t look like everyone else either by the way they are treated or what they are told. “It’s amazing how far we all have come since we were in school,” Frank said as we reflected on the Obama inauguration. It was an event neither of us thought we would ever see and something we shared as black and white that took us one step closer to a world where character is more important than color.

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